Love's labour's not lost

There have been naysayers - such as Marianne Wiggins in the Times a few weeks ago - but Nobel prize-winner Toni Morrison's new novel, Love, has been generally warmly received. "Morrison has not lost her ability to brew an extraordinary mixture of sex and spirituality," wrote Katie Owen in the Sunday Telegraph.

The Evening Standard's Melanie McGrath described Love, which is about "three black women whose poisoned lives centre on the disputed ownership of the memory - and money - of one man" as "her best work yet"; a "dark, seductive masterpiece". Morrison, she argued, "writes with such density and with such remarkable precision that to cut away a single word of Love would be to chop out its heart".

Other writers received tetchier treatment. The Times's Neel Mukherjee thought Gabriel García Márquez's memoir Living to Tell the Tale "a thrilling miracle of a book", but Amy Tan's autobiographical The Opposite of Fate, somewhat, well, the opposite: "A virulent form of emotional bulimia. Such is the extent of Tan's narcissism, her deep belief in her own status as celebrity writer, that she seems to spend most of her time en-tering her name into Google." In the Daily Telegraph, Claire Messud found the book's autobiographical sections made for "affecting reading" but agreed that Tan's miscellaneous musings "are of no apparent interest".

Kathy Lette, reviewed by Zenga Longmore in the Spectator, fared no better. Dead Sexy, said Longmore, "begins with a zany one-liner: 'How can we win the sex war when we keep fraternising with the enemy?' The next sentence is a zany one-liner: 'God, apparently as a prank, devised two sexes and called them opposite.' The third is also a zany one-liner, and the fourth and the fifth. Aaagh! Wacky one-liners choke the book, rendering the reader gasping for gravity."

The debut novel of film-maker Alan Parker elicited a more sympathetic response. The Sucker's Kiss, said Christian House in the Independent on Sunday, is "entertaining and finely wrought" and contains "one of the loveliest sex scenes put on paper as Tommy employs his criminal skills to flip, slide and slip Effie out of her clothes". Shirley Hazzard's tale of postwar romance, The Great Fire, which won the NBA in America, met with a more equivocal response. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Anne Chisholm expressed scepticism about the attempt to "endow a tender story of love lost and found with a global, even universal significance".